American Politics Research Guide: Articles

What is a Scholarly Journal?

Many professors require students to use scholarly journal articles as resources when writing research papers. Scholarly journals contain articles written by scholars for scholars. Articles are reviewed by other scholars before they are published. This is called peer review. A scholarly journal article typically has information about authors, an abstract of the article, footnotes/bibliography and perhaps extensive statistics or charts. Authors often provide at least a brief review of the literature on the subject. Many databases allow you to restrict your searches to scholarly journals, sometimes called "refereed" journals.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a search tool from Google, separate from its main search engine, with its own URL (http://scholar.google.com). Its purpose (says Google) is “to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.”

Google Scholar is an excellent resourceBUT it does not always connect to Emory sources. A book or journal article may be in the library. Never purchase an item without checking. Remember you can also borrow items from other libraries for free.

Google Scholar's strengths are that it is multidisciplinary, easy to search and provides a quick way to locate articles which cite other articles.

Articles

Political Science Complete contains full text for over 450 journals, and indexing and abstracts for nearly 2,100 titles, (including top-ranked scholarly journals). The database also features 330 full-text reference books and monographs, and over 35,000 full-text conference papers, including those of the International Political Science Association. PSC includes a subject-specific thesaurus with 10,453 terms to provide subject searching guidance to researchers.

PAIS InternationalIncludes bibliographic records from the literature of public policy, social policy and the social sciences. Types of publications indexed include books, periodicals and selected local, state, national and international government documents.

Social Sciences AbstractsIndexes core periodicals in the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, law and criminology, political science, social work, sociology, and international relations. Print edition is available at : Reference AI3 .I53 (1974-date).